:MeetPi

According to various sources, Pandemic Studios in Brisbane has struck the economic iceberg, with the apparent loss of all hands.  It becomes the first casualty in the Australian industry of the global economic crisis.  Pandemic was originally an independent developer with two offices – one in Brisbane, the other in Los Angeles.  They have put out a number of decent titles (such as the well received Destroy All Humans) and represent one of Australia’s top game companies.  In July last year Pandemic merged with Electronic Arts in a deal which, to quote Gollum, “tricksy”.

Pandemic’s impending demise – if the rumours are to be believed (and they seem like they are) – is a worrying development for the Australian game industry.  It may presage further closures in the future.  There seems to be two schools of thought regarding the relationship between games and the economy.  Some argue that games, like films in the Great Depression, will survive and perhaps even thrive as people turn to entertainment as an escape from the less than fabulous reality of a poor economic climate.  This perspective does seem to be supported by the stats – sales growth for games and consoles is still in the double digits, and where retaillers in most sectors are seeing sharp declines in profitability, some games retailers are recording increased sales – up to 22% in one case.

The other perspective is the pessimistic one.  Game development is highly reliant upon investment money, and while returns for the top games can be fantastic, picking a winner can be hard.  Put simply, games are a is a high risk investment.  In an economically conservative environment, sources of investment capital for game development are going to dry up, which in practical terms translates to fewer big game projects, more project cancellations, and this translates to job losses and perhaps studio closures.  For the biggest companies like Electronic Arts and Activision, who can finance their own game development, it means pulling back to safer core business and maintaining profit margins.  When growth through development is harder to come by, maintaining profits is a matter of saving money – or, as EA’s corporate communcations manager, Mariam Saghayer puts it, though a “cost reduction initiative that will impact facilities and headcount”.  While that makes it sound like Mariam works for a beef exporter, Mariam does in fact work for EA, and despite her corp-talk, she means closures of “studios” and sacking of “people”.

Most likely both of these perspectives will co-exist.  Game companies can be selling lots of titles and increasing profits while there is an overall contraction in the industry as a whole.  This will possibly translate to less innovation in the mainstream game market and a slowing of the development cycle.  In other words, there won’t be a next-gen console for some time to come – it will be Wii, PS3 and XBox360 at least until the economy becomes stable enough for companies like Sony (who recently took a $1.1billion hiding) to feel comfortable taking risks. So, expect to see the big companies do more of the same and milk tried and true strategies for everything they’re worth.  The Sims 3 will go on and on and on.

What this means for the Australian industry is an interesting question, which I’ll leave for another post.

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Last year I put together a visualisation of some aircraft flights that I constructed by scraping Qantas timetables from their web site and interpolating the flight data between airports.

The biggest weakness with this was the lack of detail.  Really, all I had was a start and end point for the flight, so I was just drawing lines assuming a straight line and a constant velocity.  More recently I was trawling through some posts on an astronomy forum and someone was asking if there was some way they could determine what flight they were looking at whenever they saw a plane pass over (aircraft at night can sometimes look very odd).  Some people pointed out that airports have FIDS services that provide information about aircraft departures and arrivals.  That’s not much better than scraping the Qantas site for my purposes, but it got me thinking – are there any other datasets for flights online?

The most famous example of a aircraft flight visualisation that I know of is Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns piece.  He used a combination of processing and Maya to render the lines and shapes that are drawn by the ghosts of aircraft as they make their way across the continental United States.  For his piece Koblin used data from the US Federal Aviation Authority.  I have no idea how he got the data he used.  Certainly, in the post-911 age of where terrorism is a constant source of anxiety for some, looking to access things like flight data is going to raise the wrong sorts of eyebrows.

Nonetheless, I did find something: OpenATC.  OpenATC provides flight data for airlines based on information that enthusiasts can collect with a radar dish and a $1000 device called an SDS-1.  These can be used to grab flight data reported by aircraft as they pass near a person with an SDS-1 set up.  At the time of writing, there’s pretty good coverage for Europe and some coverage in NSW in Australia, but very little elsewhere.

Inspired by Koblin’s work, I did a 3D version in processing.  You can see the results here: http://noobtronic.blip.tv/

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